AI An Existential Risk, Need Global Laws To Regulate The Space: OpenAI’s Sam Altman

Calling artificial intelligence (AI) an existential risk, OpenAI founder Sam Altman on Wednesday (June 7) called on the global leaders to come together to regulate the burgeoning space.

However, he said that the norms should not cover smaller companies deploying open large language models (LLMs), but rather major players in the ecosystem such as Google and OpenAI itself.

Speaking at an event organised by The Economic Times in New Delhi, Altman said that OpenAI was looking at countries to formulate regulations to cover the space. 

He said that if governments failed to ‘get their act together’, OpenAI would look at working together with interested companies across the globe to build norms for AI.

“The world can come together for important things…This is an existential risk. If the governments don’t get their act together, we will try our hardest to get every company to cooperate, but we can’t get every company to cooperate. We would at least like to ask for a dream world and, if we can’t have that, we will get the companies that wanna play ball together and do our best,” Altman said.

Citing India’s G20 presidency, he said that the country could prioritise and play a huge role in spurring the conversation around how such an international regulation overseeing the AI space would look like.

“… what we have called for is really setting standards and guiding companies, in a way, as to what we should be building because we know these technologies will impact the world and it needs to be a two-way conversation… so it has really been about kick starting the conversation to have it be a two-way street,” Sandhini Agarwal, AI policy researcher at OpenAI, added.

Lauding the IndiaSack, Altman said it was necessary for the countries to find ways to integrate emerging technologies into government services to improve their reach. He also exhorted that it was a good idea to have a nationally-funded AI effort to spur the ecosystem.

It is pertinent to note that India instituted a National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence back in 2018 to develop core research capability in the country.

The comments came during Altman’s tour to the country. His India trip is part of a multi-leg tour which will also include visits to countries such as Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE and South Korea. 

Earlier in the day, the OpenAI founder also met India’s G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant and discussed issues such as leveraging generative artificial intelligence to improve the quality of life of citizens.

It is pertinent to note that Altman previously served as the president of Y Combinator in 2014 before launching OpenAI in 2015. Subsequently, the AI lab served as the foundation for the generative AI-powered chatbot called ChatGPT, which took the world by storm earlier this year.

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